Payments startup Banked is poised to challenge the dominance of established players in the sector as it launches out of beta after securing another £2.35 million (€2.7 million approx.) in seed funding.

The London-based firm’s account-to-account payment software lets consumers, businesses and banks process payments in real-time, more securely, and for one-tenth of the traditional cost. It has now raised a total of £5.35million and the latest investment was led by Force Over Mass, with participation from Backed, Acrew Capital (San Francisco based) and high net worth partners including the family office of serial investor and co-founder of indeed.com, Paul Forster.

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By offering payments in real time, Banked enables merchants and customers to receive money from transactions as they happen, meaning they no longer have to wait days and weeks to see the funds. The company charges just 0.1% to process payments – a fraction of the 1-4% charge typically seen across the market. Its software also better protects consumers and businesses by transferring money without sharing customer bank details, reducing fraud by 96%.

The payments industry is predicted to be worth $3trillion by 2022* yet is still dominated by Visa and Mastercard, which operate on outdated ‘rails’, designed several decades ago. This infrastructure was not built for the digital world, and is expensive, slow and highly susceptible to fraud. The introduction of Open Banking and the adoption of open APIs by traditional banking institutions, however, has paved the way for a global payments revolution which Banked aims to lead by bypassing the old systems.

Founded in 2018, Banked is regulated in both the UK and the EU. The latest funding round will be used to build more commercial relationships and support its rollout across Europe.

Brad Goodall, Banked CEO, said: “The current payments systems used by credit card companies and most traditional banks were designed 40 years ago and have become archaic, not to mention costly and inefficient for businesses to use. It’s time we welcomed the future of payments and given the current state of the economy, businesses need this now more than ever.

“We want to be at the forefront of this new age and will be rolling out our service across the UK and the EU with invaluable support from Force over Mass and our other investors.”

Filip Coen, partner at Force Over Mass, added: “The team at Banked have identified product market fit across a number of verticals including e-commerce, B2B payments and big money industries such as gaming, trading and retail. We have been watching open banking payments closely, waiting for the right time, team, product and vision to invest in, and we see all of these within Banked and their approach.’”

To leverage the Banked checkout system, businesses simply need to embed the company’s API and this can be done across mobile apps, customer portals, emailed invoices or even text messages. Individuals can also use the free Banked app to create payment links, and start requesting money from anyone, for anything, without sharing any personal banking details.

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